


Three Country Dances

by prettylights_archivist



Category: Firefly RPF
Genre: F/M, RPF
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2005-12-25
Updated: 2005-12-25
Packaged: 2019-06-22 19:49:42
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 788
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/15589425
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/prettylights_archivist/pseuds/prettylights_archivist
Summary: by Twinkledru





	Three Country Dances

**Author's Note:**

  * For [dirty_diana](https://archiveofourown.org/users/dirty_diana/gifts).



> Note from diana, the archivist: this story was originally archived at [Pretty Lights](http://fanlore.org/wiki/Pretty_lights), which closed for financial reasons. To preserve the archive, I began manually importing its works to the AO3 as an Open Doors-approved project in May 2017. I e-mailed all creators about the move and posted announcements, but may not have reached everyone. If you are (or know) this creator, please contact me using the e-mail address on [Pretty Lights collection profile](http://archiveofourown.org/collections/prettylights/profile).

Summer and Nathan dance frequently. Summer-as-River will scream, she will rave and cry and flail and do it with the strange grace that only Summer — or, in this case, a crazy child prodigy — can have. And then she and Nathan will ruin the tension by starting to dance.

Usually it's some kind of a waltz.

And usually, she leads.

Naturally, the sight of Summer and Nathan waltzing at the end of a shoot (by which point everyone's tired and silly anyway) only pushes them all over the edge, to find themselves laughing too hard to do anything. And naturally, Joss indulges them like an annoyed parent who spoils his children anyway.

Sometimes they'll just dance individually, but usually it's something they can to together — a waltz or a tango — and Summer grins at Sean from under Nathan's arms when he twirls her, or upside-down when he's dipping her. He rolls his eyes much as he imagines he might were he  _really_  her older brother, although of course he's not.

Which, he imagines, is probably best, because otherwise he would have to feel far more awful than he does about this. The vibe people get from the characters is bad enough; he kicks himself for being such a lousy actor that everyone can see the attraction even when he's in character... until Joss lets slip that he's trying to push that dynamic and has been for awhile.

And that's something.

No one's really bothered on-set by this, and that's something too.

***

Summer's feet are never really flat, not even on the floor in the morning when she's padding around the set barefoot and drinking everyone's coffee. They all complain, and say that she doesn't have the excuse of being crazy like River does, and she says no, but she's cute, so that's got to count for something, hasn't it?

Theoretically it doesn't, but she thinks she's wearing them down. At the very least, she's getting them all used to it.

Just like they're all getting used to seeing Sean and Summer's clumsy kisses between takes, and the biggest real complaints are that now they're going to have to have their makeup fixed. The other complaints are largely teasing ones and cracks about West Virginia, so they don't really pay much attention to them. She just gets revenge later in the form of putting something in someone's chair or replacing someone's sugar with salt. And duct tape has all kinds of possibilities for the determined prankster.

She's missed this. She's missed it a lot. The whole thing, the pranks and kissing Sean, possibly on one of the beds scattered around the crew quarters' set, or in the pilot's chairs, or the infirmary set, and she's missed being able to be barefoot most of, if not all, the time.

Sean is optimistic. Talks about DVD sales, and box office takes, and how with just a little luck they'll be doing another movie this time next year, or eighteen months from now, or, well, soon.

Summer's not quite so sure, because if they had just a little luck they wouldn't have gotten cancelled in the first place, but she doesn't mention this.

***

Her voice doesn't really give a whole lot away when she calls in November. "Did you hear?" she asks, and he thinks she sounds like she might just have been dancing. Not breathless, not like she's really tired or like she's run a marathon breathless, but there's something that makes him think she's been doing something.

Of course, thoughts come to his mind that make him, as ever, glad that he only has to pretend to be her brother sometimes and now is not one of those times, but he ignores them for now, because she has something to tell him. "Did I hear what?" he asks.

"DVD," she says. "It's going to be on DVD in December. A few days before Christmas." And this is longer, so he can hear something else in her voice, and suspects it's the same thing he feels at the certainty and the understanding of what this means.

"That bad, huh?" he asks softly.

"Yeah," she says. "I guess. Who knows, the DVD sales where what got us here in the first place, so maybe... "

That's for his sake, he thinks, and it makes him smile. She was always the one who wasn't certain, who didn't want to get her hopes up too high.

"Yeah," he says, and smiles. "Maybe."

She's right, after all. It was video sales that got them the movie, not the show, so maybe video sales will get them a sequel, too. Or a miniseries, like Battlestar Galactica had. That would be okay.

So, well, that's something. There's always something.


End file.
